Paleontologists have some really new important bones from Olduvai Gorge, and they so perfectly fit into my collection of bones against paleontologists!

Olduvai is one of my favorite places in the world, a bit overrun these days by too many tourists but weathering it all well, and on every Tanzanian safari I lead we visit this magical place.

Few early man sites have been as productive as Olduvai in spite of its depth into prehistory capped by the 3-million year old lava of the super volcano Ngorongoro.

But since it was essentially “the first” real early man site, it’s probably been worked over more carefully than any other early man site in the world. I heard this year that Stanford scientists are testing a process to excavate into lava (have been unable to verify) but until recently at least Olduvai’s discoveries were limited to around 2½ million years ago.

So while the horse race among anthropologists to find the earliest hominin has had to move elsewhere (with great success, by the way), scientists who park themselves at Olduvai must be content with less sexy discoveries.

Like this year’s hand bone.

The “pinkie bone” as named by Discovery News, pushes back even earlier the date for contemporary human traits emerging in the fossil record.

Hands and their fingers are key components of modern humans and our most direct ancestors. Compared to skulls, jaws and teeth, we don’t have a lot of hands and fingers. In fact we have more feet and toes than hands and fingers.

Now this could be utterly coincidental, but I don’t think so. Paleontologists fall into that sexy class of scientists more likely to get on TV than microbiologists, and a good portion of them spend a good portion of their lives cultivating fame.

They are also much nastier to one another than other kinds of scientists but I suppose that’s governed by Nelson as well.

I think one plausible explanation for why we have fewer fossil hands and fingers is because scientists aren’t looking for them as earnestly as for skulls, jaws, teeth, toes and feet.

This is because skulls contain brains which we think are directly related to cognizance (except with Fox News presenters).

Jaws is one of the best markers towards common ancestry with apes. Teeth are marvelously durable and are a treasure box not just of the behavior and life history of the individual who had them, but of the mortality of that person’s race. Toes and feet contribute to understandings of bipedalism, which is generally considered the first indicator of hominin.

Hands and fingers … well, yes, they make tools. But there even seemed to be a greater desire for the discovery of fossil tools than the hands and fingers that had to make them.

Of course fingers especially are fragile things, made up of all sorts of tiny bones that are much less likely to become fossilized. But whether coincidence or subconscious intention, we haven’t had a lot of them.

What this current discovery does is push back to nearly 2 million years a creature with a modern-looking hand.

That’s considerably older than the other creatures whose hands we have found. In fact, it’s such a startling discovery that its scientists are suggesting it may represent still another species of early man.

Alas! My bone with paleontologists!

I’ve contended for some time that there are probably dozens of early men, dozens if not more than dozens of species of early hominin.

Paleontologists, on the other hand, are a bunch of reductionists after the fact.

By that I mean that of course every unique early man fossil found is often initially presented as something entirely new and, dare we suggest so, a new hominin species.

But that doesn’t last long. The overall culture among paleontologists is to reduce the body of evidence into as few different hominin species as possible. That’s understandable since the alternative is so daunting.

But the alternative happens to be right, and this most recent find from one of my most favorite places in the world is pretty irrefutable evidence.

An exciting early man discovery published today in Nature may hopefully reverse the insane tide of opinion that hominin evolution is singular and linear.

Clearly we, homo sapiens sapiens, are the end game in a multi-million year evolution that moved step by step from one ancient creature to another, a “linear” evolution into ourselves.

But that doesn’t mean that the “family” of early men wasn’t much broader, with all sorts of other linear evolutions going hither and yon, all dead-ending but us.

I refer to doubters as “insane” because while there are wondrous moments in science where intuitive notions prove wrong, in this case intuitive is really all we need.

All the Kings of The Ecological Hills, sharks, elephants, lions, super viruses, so-called “invasive species” like garlic mustard, and yes, even cock roaches … all of these “kings” did not arrive on a singular path from times long ago.

They all had multiple ancestors, many of which evolved into dead-ends. It’s just totally counter intuitive that we – the “King of Kings” – didn’t arrive on our throne the same way.

Early early man scientists, however, had so little to work with that it really didn’t even occur to them that there could have been other post-ape, post-preman creatures, just like there’s a whole lot of birds. The few discoveries in hand spanned a period of time that could, indeed, suggest one evolved into the other: that all of them seemed in one evolutionary track.

With more and more discoveries, however, this became less plausible, particularly among the post-Australopithecine hominins.

Australopithecine creatures predate homo creatures, and the principal morphological differences are the teeth and brain size. Whether or not some Australopithecine is ancestral to some homo, both are considered incapable of having evolved into modern apes or orangutans … but they are definitely ancestors to us, or to other hominins that went extinct.

That’s the controversy: which is it? Are there other early hominins that went extinct, or is every individual early man fossil we’ve found so far a certain step in the evolutionary ladder to us?

The question really died about 15 years ago when virtually every early man scientist back then espoused a “branching” or multiple ladders theory. Those other ladders never made it to the top: their final species went extinct. We made it.

Homo erectus, in particular, was often cited as one of those dead-ends that got pretty close biologically and socially to us. He migrated all over the earth. He made tools and recent discoveries suggest he used fire.

Then he disappeared hundreds of thousands of years before we appeared.

Meanwhile, all sorts of varied homo hominins more recent than any Austraolipithecine were being discovered: heidelbergensis, floresiensis, habilis, rudolfensis and neanderthalensis. Add us (homo sapiens) and erectus and you have 7 different species, none of which were presumed ancestral to the other.

(Some scientists added others like ergaster and gautengensis, making it 9 or more.)

And then (!) there were some other early manlike creature discoveries, post Australopithecine, that were so taxonomically different they were marginalized as hominins that might even be something else:

Orrorin tugenensis, Paranthropus aethiopicus, Paranthropus boisei and perhaps the most controversial of all, Paranthropus robustus.

If you considered these to be hominin, then there were at least 11-13 or more different hominin species, none of which was ancestral to the other.

That sounded, and still sounds, right to me. As I’ve often said, with time I imagine we’ll add to this list.

Then come these scientists who find some discoveries in Georgia a few years ago which were striking for being among the most complete skulls, and for so many skulls.

The scientists’ assessment at the time was that everything that they had found was a homo erectus and they extrapolated from other details of their discovery that really homo erectus was the only hominin species predating homo sapiens!

The old question was ressurrected.

Well, time has passed and criticism has mounted and basically the consensus that has emerged is that yes, probably there are fewer different hominin species than many once suggested, but that the Georgia finds are woefully insufficient to suggest there weren’t at least some different simultaneous homo species!

And today’s publication in Nature really helps return to this belief: Scientists working in Ethiopia report the discovery of an Australopithecine (remember, the homin creature that predates homo) that was contemporary with “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis) but way too different to be like Lucy, so a completely new species of Australopithecine!

Since Austraolopithecine predate homo this suggests that if there are multiple Australopithecine then it’s completely plausible there are multiple homo.

Done for the moment. (Hardly for the term: Stay tuned!)

Tools may no longer be as important a marker of humanness as previously thought, confirming my long held belief that tool making is universal among all life forms.

Stony Brook University scientists announced a couple weeks ago that they had found stone tools in northern Kenya as old as 3.3 million years. They called them the “world’s oldest stone tools” and that they predate by almost three-quarters of a million years previously discovered tools.

Since the oldest member of our genus, Homo, was announced in March by scientists working in Ethiopia (at 2.8 million years ago) the newly announced tools must have been used by another species, perhaps an Australopithecine.

Tool making among Australopithecine, a species that dates to more than 4 million years ago, has been claimed before but remains controversial. A major problem with older tool discoveries is that the chance of finding a tool that can be properly dated and also associated with something that had been alive at the same time becomes more and more difficult the older the tool is.

Nevertheless it always seemed intuitive to me that tools were not as important a marker of humanness as was argued.

When it was first demonstrated that chimps use tools, there was a very momentary gasp after which it just seemed like common sense. At what point is something not a “tool?” When a string of Army ants bridges a divide, is that not a tool of the ant species? When an oyster catcher hammers open a mollusk with a remarkably adapted beak, can we not call that beak a tool?

A sea gull can’t flake a rock, but it can drop a mollusk high enough above the ground to crack it open. Isn’t this “tool use?”

In the early days of paleontology finding stone tools represented a real possibility of finding human-like creatures. The only reason Lewis and Mary Leakey toiled for 27 years at Olduvai Gorge searching for a hominid was because they kept finding tools.

They were right.

But the tools that early human-like creatures used may have simply reflected their anatomy and not their brains or their consciousness.

Opposable thumbs, very dexterous hands with the ability to twist a grasp might perforce lead to the creation of a stone flake.

“Just as there were different styles of body shape and bipedal mechanics among early hominins, there were likely different styles of technical traditions,“ the eminent paleontologist John Hawks contends.

It seems to me that tool making is hardly more than a life form’s extension of its anatomy. Just as the evolution of species by natural selection is a simple truth, so should we see early tool use by natural selection.

Neither is capable of modifying their outcomes, and that seems to encumber the understanding of how natural selection might apply to tool use, since tools were modified over time to become better and better.

But that modification need not necessarily be considered consciously proactive by the tool maker or user. It could – I believe it is at its most primitive levels – the same outcome by chance that species modification is.

Just as we – homo sapiens sapiens – have emerged beyond the containments of natural selection (poor eyesight is no longer an impediment to survival, because it can be corrected by our engineering) so ultimately did tool making emerge from a dynamic of chance to one driven by human consciousness.

What we’re all fascinated with is the emergence of human consciousness and certainly the analysis of early tools can assist with this exploration. But the presumption that early tools reflect human consciousness is too sweeping a generalization.

Every creature, large and small, uses or makes tools or employs tool use. It’s just, well … natural.

One of the greatest mysteries in all paleontology is why we, modern homo sapiens sapiens, appeared so suddenly in Europe 50-65,000 years ago and equally suddenly (in paleontological terms) wiped out or subsumed the Neanderthals who had reigned in Europe for so much longer.

We know one of the reasons: we had better weapons than any of the other several species of hominin we were encountering as we fled drought in Africa.

But that sort of begs the question: why did Early Us know how to make those weapons and the Big Guy didn’t?

Neanderthal had a brain as large or larger than ours. It was a much stronger, bigger person. It would be like your high school football team beating the Seahawks (provided, of course, that Marshawn Lynch wasn’t denied the ball).

The prevailing views for last couple decades are changing.

The past notion was that Neanderthals lacked language to the same extent as our ancestors, because the absence of a hyoid bone suggested their larynx didn’t descend like ours. That is what changes our voices as we grow up, and it facilitates us making hundreds of thousands of sounds we can’t when we’re little.

Too bad. Hyoids presumed descended in the larynx in Neanderthals have now been found.

In fact descended hyoids have been found in even other old species of hominin, like heidelbergensis. I don’t want to give this up completely, though, because there are also Neanderthal whose descended larynx isn’t certain, but not so in any modern human.

How about art? Early Us left a lot of graffiti. Caves, the preferred domicile 50,000 years ago, are treasure troves of wall art, some of it quite masterful.

Well, a couple months ago scientists reported very primitive cave art found in Indonesia made by homo erectus a half million years ago!

And maybe even the Big Guy after all. Last year some archaeologists insisted they found Neanderthal cave art in Gibraltar, dated to 39,000 years ago.

Like Neanderthal’s maybe descending hyoids, I think this discovery is only maybe cave art by Neanderthals, because it might actually have been done by Early Us or by some progeny of Early Us and the Big Huy.

Now scientists are focusing on music.

Spears, rock axes, even picks and primitive balls and chains – and maybe now even cave art – have been associated with all sorts of early man species, some dating back millions not thousands of years. But musical instruments?

The oldest ever found and mostly accepted as such is a 43,000 year old flute. That corresponds close enough with the time homo sapiens sapiens began wiping out or subsuming the Neanderthal. But of course we can’t be sure that the person being wiped out wasn’t the piper.

The flute discovery has flown off into the stratosphere of tangents. All sorts of scientists, now, are wondering if chimps drumming on hollow logs is the precursor to Mozart, and that only Early Us mastered that maturation.

Take a deep breath, guys.

I think what we’re learning is that the whole range of things from better weapons to more advanced artistic and linguistic capabilities gave Early Us an extremely significant leg up not just on the Big Guy but every hominin to come before.

It was no single thing, and I’m sure music was a part of it. It’s much easier to go into battle against Neanderthal if you’re singing ‘Rule Britannia,’ can encrypt your texts and have a Gatling gun to boot.

Oh, by the way, the prevailing science today suggests that we didn’t wholesale wipe out the Neanderthal. There might have been skirmishes, but there were a lot of weddings, too.

“And in Ring 3 the battle of the century!” Oh, sorry, of “the millennia!” Nope. “Of the Milli-Millennia!”

When scientists duke it out in public it’s either for prestige or money, and the two are usually inextricably tied together. This is particularly true of paleoanthropology which has little contemporary use; it’s not going to lead to a new food or power source.

It’s pure science in the finest form.

So getting funds for the often expensive work that today includes super computers and treasured super MRIs is extremely competitive.

The battle today is between ardipithecus ramidus (Tim White, U.S.) and kenyanthropus platyops (Meave Leakey, Kenya).

Frankly, I find it maudlin how similar this public war appears to the one duked out between Meave Leakey’s husband, Richard, and Tim White’s former boss, Donald Johanson, thirty-five years ago.

It’s made maudlin mostly by maudlin Tim White, who as he has grown in experience has shrunk in stature becoming nearly reclusive and guarding his science like buried treasure.

But Meave Leakey is not without the streak of vengeance that makes this such a soap opera.

Here’s the crux of the issue (which in my mind has long since been resolved in Meave’s favor):

Does the paleontological evidence we have today (the old bones of early man) point to a more linear or more branching form of evolution?

This makes me so weary. It’s sort of like asking, Is there really global warming?

Back in the 1980s the argument was more crisply viewed, I admit. And back then, with much less money available, it was as much a battle for survival as publicity.

Back then, Donald Johanson using mostly his great find, Lucy, pronounced that humankind evolved on a step-by-step, clear timeline, from one old type of man to another, to ourselves, and that every bone ever found was one of our ancestors. Line.

Richard Leakey in a characteristic chortling and antagonistic reply, necessarily using several of his finds said Johanson was crazy, that multiple kinds of early men lived simultaneously and that they were so different they couldn’t interbreed:

I.E., all the bones of early man represented multiple, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of different creatures all “trying” to evolve into humankind and the vast majority dying out. Branch.

Today the argument doesn’t have quite the religious implications that existed in the 1980s when there was so much less fossil evidence.

White is not arguing that branching didn’t occur. But he is claiming to have drawn the line through existing fossil evidence from the earliest ancestor to us, and the key link is of course one of his finds, Ardi.

Meave Leakey, on the other hand, says that’s balderdash, that the existing fossil evidence is just by common sense such a scant portion of what actually existed, that it would be simply mathematically absurd to presume we have already found the links from the oldest to us.

Moreover, in a paper published last month in Nature, she claimed that a find she made nearly more than a decade ago is an old man that lived simultaneously with White’s Ardi but was so different it couldn’t interbreed even though it appears more “human” than White’s!

White immediately claimed Leakey’s analysis was flawed because it’s in such bad condition, and that her old man was actually the same species as his.

This is why Vanity Fair first published the definitive background to the early paleontologists rather than Science Today.

White is wrong, but Leakey’s current attempt to show him so is way too presumptive.

It’s a shame, because these are two remarkable scientists. This year Leakey became the first woman and first Kenyan to be voted into the National Academy of Sciences. White (also a member of the Academy) has a detail of field work that is mind-boggling: perhaps that’s why he never married or had a family.

But there’s neither enough fossil evidence or grant money for the two to share. And I’ll bet you three million years from now when their skulls are found, not even our future super wizards are going to be able to tell them apart.

If you like Whodunnits, you’ll love this! The answer is proconsul. Now, guess what it did.

It was another brilliant piece in the puzzle of evolution reported this week out of Lake Victoria. Published Tuesday in a scientific journal is definitive evidence that proconsul – at least some of his kind – lived in the forest.

Proconsul was an early primate of 23-25 million years ago, and it’s long been conjectured that he was the earliest common ancestor of apes and men.

There have been many fossils of proconsul found but whenever their prehistoric habitat could also be established, it was that they lived on a savannah. While that fit the general linear evolution into a hominin, it complicated the presumption that they also gave rise to the apes.

I’ve always been leery of the concept of “earliest common ancestor” among paleontologists as it tends to reenforce the linear notions of evolution, when in fact with each new piece found to the puzzle we discover how richly branched evolution was.

The idea that there was ever a “single” anything before homo sapiens sapiens seems questionable to me, and in fact there are several if not a half dozen species of proconsul already identified. So think of it more as a family of species rather than a single species.

Then it works brilliantly.

Proconsul is so important because it’s the first species in the paleontological record that is definitely not monkey-like or a lemur, which were the first primates.

The first primates were preceded by a group of early mammals, mostly little vole-like creatures, that flourished about ten million years after the dinosaurs disappeared. After earth shook off the apocalyptic event of the asteroid crashing into earth that killed the dinosaurs, it blossomed.

It was warm and humid and more and more oxygen was being created in the atmosphere in large part because of the growing plants in the sea. Earth became mostly a giant, beautiful forest, quite different from what the dinosaurs had left behind.

And so mammals and primates prospered, and they necessarily became more and more arboreal.

Then things really started to happen about 25 million years ago. The earth began cooling, earth’s tectonics got active, and in Africa the great jungles were split by the formation of the Great Rift Valley which gave rise to savannahs.

At the same time proconsul appeared. It differed from the monkeys and lemurs mostly in not having a tail. That’s not good for a creature that swings through the forest so it made sense he lived on the ground.

Apes live on the ground, much of the time, even though their home is in the forest. So that works, too. Problem was that whenever habitat could be determined with the many proconsuls found, it was always a non-forest savannah.

Alas brilliant field work mostly by Baylor University and University of Rhode Island scientists working on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria found a proconsul and its fossil preserved habitat of a forest!

Rusinga Island, by the way, is where Lewis Leakey found one of the first proconsuls almost a half century ago. (The first was discovered in 1909.) The island is rich in Miocene fossils and has been worked continuously since Leakey’s earliest discoveries. But it’s taken all this time and all this work to confirm the habitat-creature association that has been presumed by scientists for nearly a half century.

Sometimes, perseverance pays!

Be cautious about the headlines out this week regarding new early man finds in Georgia (former Soviet Union) suggesting there was only one species of early man.

A 1.8m-year old early hominin found in Dmanisi, by a team from the Georgian National Museum looks like “the earliest form of Homo erectus,” according to the current star of paleontology, Tim White, but was found together with four other hominin that previously would have been considered separate species.

This suggests, the Georgian team argues in this week’s Science that there was really only a single lineage of hominin and not the multiple branching lineages we’ve presumed to date.

In other words, the nearly two dozen named separate species and sub-species of early man that define current hominin paleontology is wrong, and there was only one species with great physical variation.

The Georgian team suggests the variation in physical appearance and brain size of currently living humans supports this view as well.

A number of respectable journals like National Geographic and the Economist Magazine are saying as much, too.

Be wary. Not everyone agrees. Tim White’s pronouncement at a glance of the evidence that the find is a homo erectus suggests he doesn’t believe so.

“I think they will be proved right that some of those early African fossils can reasonably join a variable Homo erectus species,” Chris Stringer told London’s Guardian. He continued:

“But Africa is a huge continent with a deep record of the earliest stages of human evolution, and there certainly seems to have been species-level diversity there prior to two million years ago. So I still doubt that all of the ‘early Homo’ fossils can reasonably be lumped into an evolving Homo erectus lineage. We need similarly complete African fossils from two to 2.5m years ago to test that idea properly.”

The recent paleontological star, American Lee Berger from the University of Witwatersrand who discovered Australopithecus sediba answered “No” to London’s Guardian’s question as to whether the Georgian find will radically alter the early man ancestral tree.

“This is a fantastic and important discovery, but I don’t think the evidence they have lives up to this broad claim they are making,” Berger continued.

I find it incredibly exciting how beautiful the now five finds from the Georgia site are, and certain in the years to come they will provide enormous science.

And maybe it’s just because for 30 years I’ve been telling my clients a story as we stand in Olduvai that could be significantly changed, if some of the more radical claims prove true, that makes me so skeptical.

But I don’t think so. Rather, I think it’s a reflection of our increasingly conservative times and scandalous media that otherwise respectable publications like NatGeo and the Economist will leap to such early conclusions.

It’s quite possible that the science from Dmanisi will simplify an admittedly too complex branching tree popular today: It’s quite possible that Homo erectus had far more variation than we previously thought.

But the notion that there weren’t multiple species of homo is not yet supported by the science, despite the attempts of the Georgian team to imply such. There is nothing yet to suggest that these finds were the same species as Homo habilis or Homo sapiens.

Ultimately, of course, it would only be the ability to analyze whatever nano traces of DNA might still be extracted from these stone fossils that could tell us for sure. The nature of fossil creation makes this highly unlikely, but I think the likelihood of such is greater than the claims currently being echoed in the popular media.

It heralds back to the epic battle of the 1980s between Donald Johanson and Richard Leakey. Johanson, discoverer of Lucy, was certain the hominin line was linear. Leakey was the champion of the multi-branching theories.

That battle ended in 2000 when Johanson conceded his mistake by writing in Time’s millennium addition why Leakey was one of the most important men of the 20th century.

So stay tuned, dear reader. And you’ll have to stay tuned for quite a long while, because while this won’t take quite as long as it did for erectus to be replaced by sapiens it’s not going to be a battle that ends soon.

Is a successful evolutionary adaptation to become subsumed by a more successful species? A famous anthropologist will suggest as much in his new book due out this fall.

University of Wisconsin professors John Hawks and Zach Throckmorton
will soon publish the definitive conclusions of the hectic paleontological research on Neanderthals that has consumed the last decade.

The science is not disputed. It’s derived from a bounty of Neanderthal fossils, but more importantly from the DNA which led to a complete Neanderthal genome last year.

More than 80% of the world’s population outside sub-Saharan Africa have a genetic makeup that is about 3% Neanderthal. Why not sub-Saharan people, too? Because that’s where the dominant hominin species originated from, which ultimately subsumed the only other hominin species extant, the Neanderthal, to become the last surviving human species on earth.

Us.

That wealth of scientific evidence led to all sorts of exciting discoveries, but none as exciting as trying to finally conclude what happened to these big guys.

Their brains were larger than ours, and there’s some dispute that the brain/body weight ratio wasn’t much different. But clearly they were highly successful creatures who mastered the challenging climate of northern Europe, probably better than those who conquered them: us.

I use the term “conquered” loosely. While there was a time that we thought one might be eating the other, so to speak, the general consensus today is that interbreeding, and not organized clan fighting, did them in.

The question, of course, is why did the interbreeding subsume them, instead of them subsuming us? Why were we the more successful creature?

But wait, wait! Hawks implies the inverse: he suggests that the Neanderthal was successful from a natural selection point of view, because natural selection preserved his best traits in us: the 3% of our genetic makeup that is all that’s left of these poor sops:

“I love that because it makes the Neandertals into the evolutionary success story they really were. They succeeded by becoming part of us,” Hawks paraphrases in his blog.

Is this just a word game? I think so. Hawks is a superb scientist and fabulous story teller, and I can’t wait to read the book. But this is mostly PR and a bit of a philological twist-up.

Neanderthal were subsumed by homo sapiens sapiens – and not the reverse – because we are the more successful organism. Now in the long history of early hominins Neanderthal ranks pretty much at the top, but in the contest between us and him, he lost.

That’s not evolutionary success despite the implications in Hawks’ statement. And I don’t think it’s arguable that those of us with 3% Neanderthal genes are hybrids. That’s not enough divergence to be a hybrid. It might be just enough for me to become this nit-picking, ornery and untrained bully about science. But it just doesn’t rank hybrid.

So watch for Hawks’ book, it should be fabulous. But let’s keep him more scientific even if it does mean less entertaining.

The remarkable new science of early man evolution is shifting from the hallowed halls of Harvard, Berkeley, Wisconsin and Rutgers to Wit, where it all began!

It all began about 2 million years ago.

Southern Africa was experiencing the end of a long period of climate change during which the Great Rift Valley had formed, one of earth’s most central geological features. A period of intense drought was ending. There were a lot of earthquakes going on as earth’s gargantuan plates sought long-term resting places.

Around what is now Johannesburg the veld was full of life, despite the millennia of drought that had considerably reduced the area’s biomass. But that meant that everything that was left was very successful.

There were dozens of species of rodents and antelopes, thousands of birds, and many predators like the Saber-toothed tiger. And there were men, or almost men. At least 4 species of hominins, maybe more.

Two of those were Australopithecus sediba, a woman with her child or perhaps much younger brother. They were walking among the tall forests and over the occasional meadows looking for food. They weren’t hunters.

They were looking for tubers, fruits and seeds, a pantry of nourishment hard to find in the dry conditions in which they’d been born. So often they ate more than just the leaves of a bush: they ate the bark, too.

Virtually all their waking hours were spent searching for food and avoiding predation from the tiger .. and maybe from the other types of early man especially those who had developed incisors and were eating meat, likely an evolutionary response to diminishing food sources.

All the forms of hominin at the time were small and chimp-like. But what made these two different from other types was that the front of their small brains resembled ours. And their pelvis resembled ours. Our brains and our pelvis are two very distinctive parts of the anatomy of homo sapiens.

What these two creatures didn’t know, and all the other animals in their area didn’t know either, was that they were foraging over a huge underground cave. The area was in the final stages of forming what would later become earth’s greatest vein of gold and other precious minerals, a hundred million or more years of work.

So one final touch on this geological sculpture opened up the earth above them, and they and many other animals with them tumbled into the cave and were crushed to death. Even the feared saber–tooth tiger that might have been preying on them fell prey to the earth opening up below them both.

Then hardly a few days or weeks afterwards and reflecting the great climate changes occurring on earth at the time, there was a torrential thunderstorm, and huge rivers of water poured into the cave, pushing the two early man creatures, the tiger and many other animals together into a far underground pool that quickly solidified as rock.

The site of these two creatures and many of the animals with them was discovered more than a decade ago. Excavating the remaining bones from rock, however, is a very difficult process, so the fossil bones of the female were presented to science only two years ago.

Australopithecus sediba immediately became the star of early man studies. As more and more scientists got a look at the bones, it seemed reasonable that she might be a direct ancestor to us, something that few scientists have claimed of any of the ancient Australopithecine before.

Now, thanks to new scanning technologies similar to an MRI, the bones of the younger male still in stone can be studied without being recovered from the stone!

The machine creates a perfect picture of just the fossil bone separate from the rock that cakes it. And then new 3D imaging technology creates a facsimile out of a plastic-like substance.

My narrative above, of course, is totally fictional. But what really is known of the creatures themselves is turning paleontology upside down. The results are stunning.

For years we’ve presumed that our larger pelvis was the result of having to birth a creature with a larger brain. But Au. sediba’s pelvis is relatively as large as ours, and its brain is only a third as big.

For years we’ve presumed that brain size (or more correctly the ratio of brain size to body size) determined the cognitive intelligence of the creature. But recently neuroscience has concluded cognitive intelligence is not so linked to the size of our brain as the specific formation of its frontal lobe. And guess what? Au. sediba’s frontal lobe is remarkably like ours, and remarkably unlike other early men we have in study.

And perhaps the most stunning discovery of all might be … skin. Fossil bones are not organic. When we say that this creature or that ate this or that, it’s a presumption from the fossil remains of seeds and plant casings that have turned to stone.

But the unique, fast way these creatures and all the life around them was encased in stone lends hope that real organic matter with DNA, such as skin, might be preserved!

There’s another stunning development. Unlike many American paleontologists who guard their science like their family heirlooms, the science being undertaken at the University of Witwatersrand is the most transparent paleontology ever undertaken.

The ongoing excavations will be video streamed in real time! The laboratory work, the fossil bones already completely recovered are wide open to virtually any scientist in the world to take a look at. This transparency is not simply revolutionary, it is incredibly refreshing and long overdue.

Compare this southern African science, for example, to American Tim White’s ten-year secrecy of the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus.

The chief scientist and discover is an American, Lee Berger, who has been associated with the University of Witwatersrand for more than ten years. His wife, Jackie Smilg, is the person developing the scanning technology.

And with full backing of the government of South Africa, the Cradle of Humankind is becoming not only a major tourist attraction, but a scientific center.

For all of modern history, early man science has had its thoroughfare in the universities and museums of the western world. No longer. It’s back home!

What goes around comes around.